Dynamic Shared States Management for Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment

Building an interactive virtual environment may involve diverse modules for performing various tasks like handling a group of interaction devices, multimodal/multi-cluster rendering displays as well multipurpose simulations. This requires a fine-grain sharing of inter-module states. Previously, this fine-grain control can only be achieved through hardware subsystems within a single computer. With advancement of network technology, it is becoming possible to achieve fine-grain control over a cluster of computers that are closely connected, hence, an interactive virtual environment with multiple modules distributed across a local-area network. Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment (DIVE) may involve distributed modules as well as distributed virtual environments that are shared across a group of user participants. In either case, the goal of DIVE is user’s perception of interacting with a single virtual environment system; this is made possible through sharing dynamically changing state information across distributed objects and events. Depending on update rate and synchronization requirements of the dynamically changing shared states, the system requires from fine-grain to coarse-grain control over the shared states. In this paper, we introduce effective approaches to dynamically shared state management (DSSM) across the spectrum of control requirements by DIVE.